Apple's iPad is an innovative and revolutionary product that has been a huge success worldwide. It has been deemed the new 'king of the tablets' and within just 80 days of its release in the US, iPad sales reached 3 million. This is an unbelievable feat for Apple and it is a testament to just how hysterical and obsessed some of us are with Apple products.
Is there an alternative? The answer is yes... soon there will be.
This year, at the 30th annual Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, ASUSTek showed the world that it may have a product that can compete with the iPad. ASUSTek (or ASUS) announced that it will be releasing their new ASUS Eee Pad anytime between January and March of next year (2011). Being one of a dozen tablet prototypes on display at the Computex trade show this year, the ASUS Eee Pad blew away its competition.
The ASUS Eee Pad is an iPad like tablet with more features and more power than the Apple iPad. The new ASUS Eee Pad has improved upon Apple’s iPad design with several added features that are not found on the iPad or that are only available on the iPad as paid and costly upgrades.
The Eee Pad will be available in two different screen models (10.1" and 12") and it will be is the first tablet on the market to use Microsoft’s Windows 7 software. The Eee Pad is a very powerful machine that can be used to surf the web, play multimedia as well as run popular applications such as Microsoft Word. The Eee Pad has a touch-sensitive screen and it is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It also has a 10-hour battery life and at least 2 USB ports.
The Eee Pad is far better than the iPad because it has a few added features that are missing from Apple's iPad and that have become vital to most internet users. For one, the Apple iPad does not come equipped with a camera which has resulted in many users complaints. The Eee Pad has been able to one-up the iPad with an integrated Webcam thus allowing its users to easily and conveniently video chat with their friends and family. The Apple iPad also only has 256 MB of RAM. Both of the Eee Pad models will have between 512MB to 2GB of RAM, boosting the Eee Pad's performance and multitasking capabilities well beyond that of the iPad. The Eee Pad is also able to run Flash thus allowing its users to view YouTube and other video programs on the Internet. Sadly, the iPad lacks Flash support which has alienated many of its users.
The 12” EeePad is also being release with a keyboard docking station so that it can act as both a light-weight, portable tablet and a stationary laptop. The Eee Pad can be easily attached and detached from its keyboard allowing the Eee Pad to not only compete with the iPad but to also compete with other laptops on the market today.
The Eee Pad is expected to cost between $399 to $449. This will be a welcome change to Apple's iPads which cost $499, $599 or $699, depending on the data storage capacity.
So, as it stands now, ASUSTek’s Eee Pad seems to be quite incredible. I am sure that ASUSTek's announcement of the Eee Pad release last month has sent the Apple development team into a frenzy. Do you think that the Eee Pad will really be all that it is cracked up to be?